


Good for Sanitation

by viaorel



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: A lot of Derek pestering, Alternate Universe - Human, Cora used to be a stalker, Explicit Language, F/M, M/M, The Hales are all alive and well
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-17
Updated: 2014-02-17
Packaged: 2018-01-12 20:48:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1199682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viaorel/pseuds/viaorel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the fire, the Hales are forced to live in Peter’s apartment  for a while until the insurance money comes through, but so far they are pretty much broke. Moreover, neither Peter’s three daughters nor their cousins care for keeping their home clean much, which is why finding their overcrowded place licked clean one day gets Laura super suspicious.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Good for Sanitation

**Author's Note:**

> I gave Peter three daughters for this work: Stacy, Lila and Steph, who are sixteen, ten and eight respectively. Laura is twenty five, Derek is twenty four, Cora is fourteen and Stiles is eighteen.  
> Enjoy!

“Who hanged the new towels in the bathroom?”

Laura is holding one of those towels – the good ones, crispy, perfect, absolutely virgin – and scrutinizing everyone in the kitchen with her x-ray vision.

“What?” Cora raises a carefully plucked eyebrow at her. She is sitting loftily at the table, her make-up bag disemboweled all over it, a small mirror in her hand, which she navigates to catch the good light from the window because the light sucks in their room. At the moment she is attempting to destroy her naturally pretty face with even more rouge because she is fourteen and hates mostly every part of her body. “Wasn’t me.”

Their ten-year-old cousin Lila, who, as usual, turns a simple task like drinking cocoa into a major mess, reaches her smeared hand to feel the white cloth of the towel, but Laura steps away just in time to save the day.

“You, stay away, little piggy. Cora, go clean her up.”

“Nuh-uh, I’m busy.”

“It’s way too early for Halloween, little sis.”

Cora makes a face at her but instead of putting down the brush slides out her new lipstick of an obscenely bright color and gets ready to add that to her already radiant face. This is exactly the time when Steph, their other cousin of eight years old, fails to place her cup on the table properly and it tips over, spreading a rapidly growing brownish tsunami all over the surface, including Cora’s make-up stuff. Some of the cocoa drips on her dress before she can jump away – and, boy of boy, is she going to yell now.

“STEPHANIE, WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU- THIS IS MY DRESS! THIS IS MY ONLY DRESS!”

 “You can cancel your date tonight, big deal,” Laura snorts. “You looked like a fifty-year-old hooker  desperate for drug money with all that make-up anyway.”

“Shut up!” Cora storms out of the kitchen and into the bathroom. Laura follows, just out of curiosity: is she too upset to notice all the weirdness? Turns out she’s not, because the first thing Cora says after quickly examining the bathroom is, “The drain is clean. Where did all the hair go?”

“I know, right? And the sink, check out the sink!”

“Wow, it’s shiny!” Cora exclaims, blown away. “I didn’t know it was that white before.” She turns to the towel rack to her left to see every towel except the one Laura has stolen hanging perfectly straight, as if someone actually used a ruler for the job. “Fuck me, do we have a secret maid or something?”

“I don’t know, but this is some weird shit,” Laura agrees. “I mean, look up.”

They usually wash their daily wear like socks, bras and panties themselves and hang them on the wash lines above the bathtub because it’s still too cold for it to dry off outside and also because most of their stuff burned along with the house and they can’t afford the luxury of waiting till laundry day. Now, however, the lines above are perfectly empty, stripped of their usual load.

“Hey, where’s our stuff?” Cora demands.

“No idea. Let’s go ask Stacy.”

Stacy is their third cousin and Uncle Pete’s oldest daughter who still remembers her mother well enough to miss her, unlike the other two who are happy with having just the father. That is probably why Stacy is a little jacked up in the head. She is sixteen now and the gothic faze is still an issue.

There are only three rooms in the apartment they have to live in now until the insurance money comes through, which is two months due now, so it is not very hard to find Stacy. Especially when you count the wailing music coming from the farthest room. To get to it, you need to cross the hallway, which also looks exceptionally neat with all the family’s shoes lined up and looking shiny, and then go through one of the rooms, the one Derek, Laura and Cora are occupying at the moment.

And it also looks different. Clean, more spacious.

“Where are our clothes?” Cora points at the armchair, which is always covered with all sorts of garbage, unless now it is absolutely clear. “And my textbooks? The chargers? What the hell is going on?”

“Look,” Laura points at Derek’s corner, where his sports equipment lies. His set of weights, from cute little ten-pounders to the ones that weigh like their cousin Lily, are usually in slight disarray, which is understandable – Derek uses them every morning, why would he bother placing them in perfect order every time? Except for now they are. His running shoes are all spotless perhaps for the first time in months of gloomy slush that happened to be winter this year and his training shoes look different with the usual wrinkled socks inside them missing. Laura peers around, eyes squinted suspiciously, and then sniffs. It smells unusual, too. Fresh, nice, a bit minty perhaps.

The smell seems to be coming from the beds, and Laura lifts the cover of her and Cora’s bed, which is technically a really old convertible sofa, bends over it and inhales. Yup, that’s right, some creepy neat freak changed their bed sheets using too much softener on them. The sofa, by the way, has probably never seen itself so perfectly made in its petty little life, the same goes for the monstrosity Derek sleeps in. If Laura had her doubts about the secret maid before, now it’s official. And also officially creepy.

 “Someone stole all my hair ties,” Cora whines helplessly all the way through examining the dresser, which is also missing one major pile constructed of all sorts of girly whatnots. “Seriously, where’s our stuff?”

They leave their freakishly clean room in mournful silence and walk into the one where their cousins are living now.

“Stacy, tune it down a notch, will you?”

Laura frowns. Honestly, if she could, she’d spank the attitude right out of the little fucker with great pleasure, but can she do anything? No, she can’t, because, quote-unquote, _these_ _people were kind and generous enough to let us stay in their home and you will respect that, Laura_. Sheesh.

“STACY!”

It is her favorite thing – to make everyone ask her twice. She is just like Uncle Peter, only a gazillion times worse, teenage douchebaggery and abandonment issues combined.

“What is it?” Stacy growls as she turns in her favorite swivel chair, a nail polish brush in one hand and the other hand sprawled so as not to disturb the fresh layer of blackness on the nails.

“Why are there new towels in the bathroom?” Cora blurts out demandingly. “And where has all our stuff gone? Did you do something to it? Because if you used them for some creepy-fuck voodoo shit to make us leave quicker, I swear-”

“Your stuff is fine, jeez,” Stacy clicks her tongue and blows on her nails. “Shouldn’t you, like, be nagging your dorky brother about it? Because I’m pretty sure I saw him lick your room clean in the morning right after you left for school and you – for that job interview. How did it go, by the way?”

Laura shrugs helplessly: life is a bitch to her now. Then it hits her.

“What? Derek did all this?”

She shares a concerned look with Cora. Their brother, though being the neatest of them, is still light years away from sweeping through the apartment like a neat freak in heat, and he has long given up bugging them about their girly stuff lying around their small room. It can’t possibly have been Derek.

“Bullshit,” Cora throws accusingly, but Stacy only rolls her eyes. She has beautiful eyes, just like Uncle Pete, but it doesn’t excuse her ultimate douchebaggery one bit.

“Suit yourself.”

“Why would _Derek_ clean up?”

“Uh, I don’t know, maybe living in the world of messy girls who always forget their tampons in the most random places-”

“That was once!” Cora growls.

“-and keep their panties on display is not very enjoyable for a twenty-four-year-old who is used to living alone but is instead forced to deal with all the worst torture the female gender has in store. I’m pretty sure it messes with his masculine chi or whatever, he wanted the stuff gone so he took care of it. I don’t blame him – living with you guys is gross.”

 “No, you’re gross!” Cora flares up, pointing an angry finger at her. “You’re supposed to take care of the apartment, you’re the oldest, but when we moved in here, everything around was covered in, like, a layer of dust! Your home was a total shithole before we even stepped foot in it!”

“Don’t like, don’t read,” Stacy shrugs innocently. “You prefer homeless? The least you could do was show this apartment some respect and keep your shit in order.”

“ _You_ don’t!”

“I,” she presses a hand to her chest, “am a resident here. You, on the other hand, are mere guests, you are supposed to be modest and nice and not lay your shit everywhere you please, got it? Why can’t you be more like your mom? She works two jobs and yet still finds the time to do some housework around here. You know what? When the insurance money comes through, you should just leave her with us and move along to cover your own, brand new house with layers and layers of your stupid shit. You don’t deserve her.”

“Like you do!” Cora thunders.

It only makes Stacy snort, which is probably the right time for Laura to interfere because otherwise the two will start biting and throwing feces at each other like in those nature documentaries. Gosh, if she weren’t fresh from a nasty divorce and didn’t have anywhere else to live, she’d be as far away from this nuthouse as her feet could carry her, but the Universe doesn’t seem to like her much these days, case in point.

“Girls, girls,” she says reluctantly and stands between them like a referee. Cora is actually making a threatening growling sound in her throat at this point, which is kind of funny considering how much make-up her rage-stricken face is wearing. “Do you see any point in this? I don’t. It doesn’t get us any closer to solving the riddle, but if you want to keep being assholes to each other, I’ll leave you to it.”

It’s nice to be the oldest – when you speak, they actually listen. And this is precisely why, at the moment of silent contemplation, they can hear the keys rattling at the front door and then – voices. The three of them rush out of the room, Cora first, anxious to throw her anger at someone else and Stacy probably just wanting to snigger at someone else’s misery. She does that.

They stumble into the hall in a huge pile of limbs as Mom finishes, “-and just stop worrying so much. They’ll behave, I promise.”

Derek produces a doubtful smile, and this is when Laura notices that he, just like the apartment, looks weirdly different. The eternal stubble, the loyal sidekick to his serial killer stare, is gone, which makes Derek look a little less threatening and a little more like a sweet gentleman he actually is deep down under all those muscles. This is not the only change, however. His hair is shorter and neater, and, God help them all, why is he wearing a shirt and tie under the leather jacket, which all looks really new and expensive?

“What the hell?” Cora wails like a siren. “Mom! Why is Derek wearing new things? I need new things more, I’m a girl!”

The little ones run out of the kitchen at that, Lila still dirty like a piglet and Steph not far behind.

“Aunt Talia!” Lila squeals and glues herself to Mom’s legs while the other girl almost catches Derek before he barricades himself with a wall of bulky shopping bags. Right, new clothes, wouldn’t want them to get all messed up.

“Mom!” Cora is now shaking. “Tell me there’s something for me in those bags! Steph spilled her cocoa all over my dress and I can’t go on my date now!”

You have to be the bravest woman in the whole world to stand up to a teenage girl deprived of new wardrobe, but that’s what Talia Hale is. As soon as she extricates herself from the clingy ten-year-old octopus niece and shoos the other one away from Derek, she pleads with a smile, “Come on, honey, don’t be selfish. Derek is doing enough for us already, he deserves to spend at least part of his money on himself.”

“But _Mom_!” Cora yells and stomps her feet like a toddler throwing a tantrum. “Everybody at school thinks I’m a bum now because I wear the same clothes all the time!”

“Technically, you are homeless,” Stacy points out, being the douchebag she is, and Laura barely makes it in time to prevent Cora from hitting her.

“Honey,” Mom says, stern notes faintly showing in her usually reserved voice, “you have enough clothes.”

“It’s not even ten per cent of what I used to have before that stupid fire! And Derek wasn’t even there, he didn’t lose anything!”

“He has lost plenty, starting with his privacy when he gave up renting that apartment and moved in here just so you girls could have something to wear until we get our money back.” Mom is a slow burner, she will not be manipulated that easily, especially not by a mouthy teenage squirt Cora is, but the small traces of growing displeasure are still showing. Cora should be shutting her face now. “Moreover, because we had to deprive Derek of his privacy and he is a grown man who is sacrificing everything he has for the sake of his family, this night you and Laura will be spending in your cousins’ room.”

Cora’s jaw slacks down in a theatrical _no way_ , and this is when things finally start making sense to Laura as she darts her eyes from Mom to Derek, who looks really uncomfortable. Really, really uncomfortable. Just like Laura did when she brought her first serious boyfriend to spend the night at their house and meet all her family.

“Oh,” is all she says before Mom voices her assumption to everyone.

“Derek is having an important guest over tonight, he will need extra room and I expect all of you girls to behave.”

Stacy snickers in her fist, delighted, “So that’s what it is with the cleaning. He doesn’t want his girlfriend to see the mess he is living in. How sweet.”

Derek gets mortified at that and gives their mom a hopeful look. She pats him comfortingly on the shoulder and then turns to give the three older girls the stink eye only a mother can pull off, “If someone here were a little neater with their things, Derek wouldn’t have had to spend two hours straightening everything up. Seriously, girls, this is wrong.”

“Not the point, Mom,” Cora springs back into battle, having stomached the initial shock. “Why does he get the whole room to himself? Plus, the six of us won’t even fit!”

“All right, we will take Steph,” Mom nods to the youngest of the Hales present, and also the biggest mess-maker. “Pumpkin, you’ll be spending the night with me, Uncle Eric and your dad, okay?”

“Okay,” the girl sighs. “But will I get to see Derek’s girlfriend?”

“Yeah,” Cora puffs air out indignantly and crosses her arms. “I also have a couple of words to say to the bitch who stole my room.”

Mom rolls her eyes and motions Derek to get the grocery bags to the kitchen. “Now listen,” she lowers her voice when he leaves, “I don’t want anyone pestering him about this, but it’s very important that you girls make a good impression tonight. It’s the first time I remember Derek bringing someone home, and this time it wasn’t even Dad and I who insisted he do that. He _wanted_ us all to officially meet this person.”

“Who is it?” Laura also drops her voice to a hardly audible whisper because Derek has an exceptional hearing. Once, he accidentally eavesdropped on her very lame phone break-up with her first boyfriend and felt obliged to make her hot cocoa and sit through her stifled crying in the kitchen half the night. “Do you know her?”

“I actually saw them meet,” Mom grins. “It was in the ER about a month ago.”

“When Derek’s stupid chin-up bar finally gave in?” Laura smirks. She actually likes thinking about that time when, according to her, justice prevailed and that monstrous thing her brother had brought from his rental apartment along with his weights and some other equipment detached itself from the doorframe with Derek still hanging on it and made him fall hilariously on his ass. Oh, they had been laughing so hard at his pained expression right before Mom came in and made him go to the ER. He actually hurt himself, but in their defense, she and Cora had been nagging him for weeks to either start wearing clothes while working out or go do that outside. They were his sisters, true, but it was nevertheless disturbing to see a practically naked guy work his body right in front of their noses twice a day. Not to mention all Cora’s teenage friends would not stop hoarding at their place in hope of catching a glimpse of those washboard abs. Ew.

“Yes, then,” Mom confirms with a slightly distressed nod.

“Is he dating a hot nurse?” Stacy takes a guess, eyes glistening. “That’s hot.”

“I will let him tell you the rest. Derek, honey, did you put the milk in the fridge?”

He comes out of the kitchen with an eyebrow raised and a plastic bag of chicken legs in his hand.

“Mom, didn’t I tell you he was vegetarian? Tell me we have something else for dinner.”

“ _He_?” Cora chokes on air, and so do Laura and Stacy. The young ones, however, remain blissfully oblivious and keep rummaging through their Aunt Talia’s bag looking for some treasure. “Derek, are you dating a hot male nurse?”

He turns to Mom, face sour. “I was kind of hoping you’d break it to them.”

She shrugs innocently and then does the shittiest thing a mother can ever do, which is abandon her son to deal with three incredibly nosy and just as annoyed girls, none of which he can ease up to by some flexing and a sprinkle of sweet-talk. The two little ones follow Mom like docile puppies to the kitchen.

“Aunt Talia, why is Derek’s nurse hot?” everyone can hear Steph’s squeaky voice. “It’s February.”

“What gives, Derek?” Cora begins, face macabre and arms still crossed as if she were withholding herself from fishing out a stiletto from a nook in her dress and sacrificing his lying ass to evil gods. “You didn’t even bother to tell us you were gay now?”

He rolls his eyes but keeps his mouth shut stoically. Is he waiting for more reproach or just doesn’t know how to react? Or is he already terrified of all the jokes that will unavoidably fall into his lap pretty soon?

“Is that why you’re always bugging me and Laura about our bras lying around the room? Are you afraid of boobs, Derek?”

“What?” He shakes his head as if to unsee a horrible picture. “Listen, guys, it’s not-”

“At least all the manic working out makes sense now,” Stacy chuckles, for the first time since ever joining forces with Cora. “Your nurse-boy likes his men strong.”

It’s actually getting funny to watch Derek cringe and look absolutely miserable, so Laura decides to join in the fun.

“You guys, imagine all the hot sex in scrubs in some coma patient’s room, oh my God. How could you, Derek? It could have been you on that bed!”

 “Maybe it was him,” Cora wiggles her eyebrows. “Maybe they moved the coma guy to the floor till the deed was done.”

“Such shitheads! Derek, your boyfriend is an irresponsible brat, I wouldn’t ever let him near me if I got sick and it was the end of the world and he was the only guy with medical education still alive!”

Derek exhales heavily through his nostrils, shuts his eyes and presses two fingers to the bridge of his nose – the familiar gesture that means he is about done. He won’t yell, Derek never yells at his girls, but something scary and most likely explosive is definitely cooking up deep inside that firm chest. This is probably twisted and totally not cool of her, but Laura can’t wait to see what happens when shit finally hits the fan.

“Wait, wait, you guys!” Cora squeals enthusiastically, arms flying all over the place in excitement. “What if we got it all wrong? What if it’s not a handsome nurse-boy but some old beardy surgeon? A silver fox maybe?”

“Oh my God,” Stacy whispers, “this is even better!”

“A bitter forty-year-old Russian genius doctor underappreciated in his own country?” Cora suggests with an evil snigger. “No-no, I bet he’s a fugitive who ran off to the Land of the Free after being severely oppressed by the KGB.”

Derek makes a pained sound into his palm and mutters, “They don’t have the KGB since 1991, Cora.”

“You would know,” she retorts. “I bet he reads you Tolstoy in bed and sneaks vodka in your morning coffee. Hey, does he have a matryoshka of Stalin on his bedstand? Does he perform weird kinky stuff with it?”

“You forgot to ask if he has a pet bear,” Derek sighs, exasperated. “And for your information, Stalin was just as homophobic as their current president is, if not worse, why would he even- ugh, wait, you know what? Forget it. I will not take responsibility for your ignorance, and I shouldn’t even care that my little sister takes great pride in insulting all the Americans of Russian descent for fun. Not my problem.”

Cora shoots him a shit-eating grin, “Oh, it’s so cute you are willing to defend your gentleman friend’s honor like that!”

“I’d do much more for someone with hands as skilled as a surgeon’s,” Stacy pipes up pensively, and, apparently, this is the breaking point for poor Derek – he disengages himself from the wall he has been leaning on listlessly this whole time and stares at them, irritation mixed with mild disappointment.

“He’s eighteen, all right?”

Laura had a really good hand joke coming right about now, but the statement catches her off guard, which is only a mild way to put it for Cora and Stacy.

“What?” Cora screeches.

“And he’s not a surgeon, not even a nurse. He was in the hospital that day only because his friend’s mom works there, they were paying her a visit. And he’s not Russian either – no Stalin matryoshkas, I’m afraid.”

There is a really long and really awkward silence after that – so long, in fact, that when the piggies return from the kitchen, all clean and giggling, everyone hears Lila’s stifled whisper into her sister’s tiny ear, “That means he likes another boy.”

Laura can do the math, and so can her sister.

“Eighteen?” Cora repeats, eyes comically bulging out. “Derek, you’re twenty four! It’s not fair, I should be dating your guy!”

“From the looks of it, you should be paying attention in class,” Derek snaps back. His phone vibrates in his pocket, but he takes no heed, too wired up for distractions. The desire to just let go and express his actual feelings is written all over his face, but the gentleman inside seems to win this one just as always and he bites his tongue.

“You’re _six years_ older than him!” Cora hollers, red-faced and most likely seconds away from spontaneous combustion. “I wasn’t allowed to date Scott because he was four years older!”

Stacy snorts, “You only wanted him because he hung out with that ADHD motormouth boy you had a major crush on in middle school. God, you were even more pathetic than you are now, all angles and braces and those ugly-”

“Shut up!”

“It’s only true, baby cousin.”

Derek’s phone keeps making a low ominous _vvvvvv_ in his pocket, but he ignores it again. For some reason his expression turns horror-struck, as if the idea that his little sister is, in fact, old enough to legitimately have crushes, wounded him deeply. Or is it something else? Apart from being scared shitless, he also seems kind of. . . guilty? What’s up with that?

“Cora,” Derek demands, lunging closer frantically, “what was the name of that boy?”

“Scott McCall,” she answers on instinct, “What’s it to you?”

Of course he’s shocked, Laura tells herself, he hasn’t been living with the family for about four years now and has no knowledge of Cora’s personal affairs – Laura herself was let in only recently, when she moved back in after her divorce. The explanation is reasonable enough, although Derek’s sudden burst of inquisitiveness seems rather odd and not quite about Cora. 

“Not him, the other boy,” Derek urges on, “his friend? What was his name?”

“What does it-” Cora begins, puzzled, and this is when the doorbell rings, effectively cutting the scene. It’s time for Uncle Peter and Dad to return from the hospital where they still make Dad go three times a week to check on his burnt parts. Derek turns swiftly to answer the door, but the two little piggies outrun him, squealing and stomping like the noisy rascals they are. They like doing it – throwing their tiny bodies at whoever is at the door, all psyched and hug-hungry, eager to get attention. It is sad sometimes how much they crave for it, with their mom gone and their dad working round the clock to provide for them.

Derek hurries after his cousins and ends up blocking the view, which is why Laura hears the voice first – and when she sees Cora’s face turning freakishly alarmed, the full picture lights up in her head just like that.

“Uh, hi, I’ve been calling to give you a heads-up, but you didn’t answer. I’ve lost my key and my roommate’s out of town, so I kind of had nowhere else to go, and when I called my dad, he said it’d be a good idea to help out in the kitchen, since, you know, I can actually cook rather well and your mom would appreciate the help. Am I rambling yet? You promised to stop me.”

Cora’s face turns mortified while Stacy’s flourishes. It is getting rather creepy to stand in the proximity of these two, and Laura moves away, closer to the door, which is still blocked effectively by Derek.

“Hi there,” Lila’s high-pitched voice interferes.

“Uh, hi.”

“Are you Derek’s boyfriend?”

“I’d like to think so, yeah.”

“Why couldn’t you be his _girlfriend_?” Steph pipes up half-accusingly.

The question might have scared off any other adult dealing with an innocent mind, but Derek’s eighteen-year-old boyfriend seems to have everything under control.

“I could be, I guess,” he muses, a faint grin audible in his voice. “If my parents hadn’t given me the Y chromosome, the root of all evil, honestly. Then I’m sure I would be the most perfect girlfriend Derek could ever wish for himself. But here I am, a full-on boy, and Derek doesn’t seem to complain. Have I answered your question, young and overly inquisitive ladies? And also very pretty.”

He makes both of the little piggies giggle and skedaddle back to the kitchen, where Mom immediately asks them who has made them so agitated. When Derek shifts to let them pass, Laura immediately swoops in to finally get a look at the guy.

He’s cute. And also very nervous. And also the guy from those pictures on Cora’s phone which she showed Laura in the heat of sisterly affection about a month before the fire to cheer her up about that nasty divorce.

 _If you think you’re the ultimate douche when it comes to love_ , Cora said then, _think again. I used to have such a gigantic crush on that guy in seventh grade I couldn’t even bring myself to look at him straight. He was a sophomore, played sports but wasn’t really the jocky type, super friendly and charmingly awkward, but to me he was light years away. I used to stalk his facebook, his twitter, his tumblr – oh my God, I was a total creeper back then, you have no idea. Once, when I retweeted one of his tweets, I had a full-on freakout that he might follow me, read my tweets and figure out they were about him. Man, I was so lame. I even almost ended up dating his best friend! We flirted online but never spoke at school, like it was our little secret or something. Later he told me that he knew about my crush and, if I wanted, he could put in a good word for me to him. I felt so ashamed and stupid that I unfriended him on Facebook and never spoke to him again. I was catching some weird looks from my crush for about a month after that, but then it was all water under the bridge. I even mustered up the courage to hug him on his last day of school. He just said thanks and gave me a wide smile, like he actually remembered me. I doubt it though, all the girls at school got at least one hug from every even remotely cute graduating senior that day._

As it turns out, the said crush has not forgotten about the geeky girl with braces from two years ago because as soon as his eyes fix on Cora, he goes very still and his sheepish half-smile falters.

“Oh my God, Cora Hale,” he whispers, absolutely mortified, and then hits himself on the forehead with the hand free of a grocery bag. “Right, Hale! I thought it sounded familiar!”

There is a lot of staring going on in the next minute. Derek stares at Cora in utter horror as if she were holding a shotgun and ready to go on a bloodthirsty rampage any moment now, Cora switches her really heavy gaze from Derek back to the guy, Stacy beams at everyone and is definitely having the time of her life. Okay, this is some unexpected shit.

“Stiles!” Mom’s cheerful voice interrupts the quiet showdown. She is wiping her hands dry on a kitchen towel and doesn’t seem to notice anything odd. “I’m so glad you could make it! Derek, why are you keeping our guest in the doorway? Go on, invite him in!”

“Hey, Mrs. H,” Stiles (what kind of name is that?) forces a grin and steps in. “I, er, brought some stuff for dinner and I also wanted to help out in the kitchen, if you don’t mind my company.”

“Of course not!” Mom says with her sweetest smile, but when she turns to Cora and Stacy, her eyes catch that crazy tyrannical glimmer she only uses when her girls are being total jerks. “Girls, why don’t you go to your room and find yourself something useful to do while we finish dinner? You can’t cook worth a dime anyway.”

This is how the bundle of nerves disengages and a couple of minutes later Laura finds herself peeling potatoes in the kitchen and listening to Cora’s huge crush’s side of the story.

“I didn’t even make the connection,” Stiles complains to both Derek and Mom while rinsing out the greens. “I mean, it’s a large city, what are the chances? Although when you said you knew the school I’d graduated from, I should have thought of that. Damn, that was stupid, and it’s not like I had a lot of girls stalking me in school – there was only her. Could have connected the dots. Do you think she hates me now?”

“She’s fourteen, her hormones hate a lot of people for her now,” Derek shrugs.

“And,” Mom cuts in with a smirk, “she has had at least two boyfriends already, don’t you think she’s over you?”

“No, of course she is, she must be,” Stiles mutters awkwardly. “And it’s not like she liked me as a person – I mean, how much can you really tell from one’s blogs and social media accounts?”

 “A lot,” Derek and Laura say in unison, then Derek elaborates with a smirk, “The first thing I did when you friended me on Facebook was snoop all over your page. Then I spent the night reading your hell knows how many tweets.”

“Er, well,” Stiles hesitates, “to be honest, your account mostly had pretentious sayings and pictures of your car, so I didn’t find it as fascinating. But it did give me some ideas about what we could do with that sweet ride of yours later on.” Upon realizing what he just said, he turns to Mom, absolutely horror-struck, and adds weakly, cringing as he goes, “Which was totally non-sexual, normal guy stuff like talking about engines and other. . . car parts. Oh shit, I’m so sorry, Mrs. H, we totally didn’t do anything in that car, I swear.”

She only grins and leaves the comment hanging in the air, which is typical Mom.

“So, Derek,” Laura enters the scene in her Queen of Nonchalant tone, “how does it feel to know that you and your teenage sister perved over the same guy’s twitter? Do you think you favored the same tweets? Saved the same pictures of him perhaps? Were tempted to reply but deleted everything in horror and freaked out about it inwardly for hours?”

Stiles’ expression at that is worth every single bit of hating vibes she gets from Derek. “I haven’t had the time to process the situation at that angle actually,” he acknowledges. “Now it is all I can think about. Hey, do you think it would be rude if we asked Cora which pictures of me she liked? We could then compare them to the ones I saw on your phone, and then-”

“No, we are not doing this,” Derek cuts him roughly. “We are not going there, Stiles.”

The guy shrugs innocently, “Just saying. It would be a good bonding time for the three of us.”

They don’t have enough time to fight over that because the male part of the Hales arrive home from the hospital.

“I have never seen my apartment so clean before,” Uncle Peter speculates, impressed, after coming out of the bathroom. “You should invite your boyfriend over more often, Derek.”

Derek’s grumpy response is consumed by Dad’s surprised gasp, “Hey, I know you! You used to be on the team at Cora’s school!”

“Yeah, I was lame. Sorry about that,” Stiles laughs nervously. “Should have remained a benchwarmer, I looked more useful that way.”

Dad snorts, amused, and this is when Laura realizes with a pang in the chest that every grownup in the apartment must have known about Stiles for quite a while if even Dad seems to have no problem with his son dating another guy while she distinctly remembers him yelling at the TV whenever the issue of gay marriage was being discussed. It would have been good news if not for the fact that everyone thought it unnecessary to invite her in the loop, and she is more of a grownup that Derek will ever be! She even got married _and_ divorced – kids can’t do that!

“She used to like you a lot, you know,” Dad smiles a bit wistfully. “She’d make me drive her from the games – never missed one. Some wicked fan she was. I remember this one time when the victory was hanging by a thread and you stepped in and somehow saved the score.”

“Yeah, that was a total fluke, I remember that,” the corner of Stiles’ mouth twitches awkwardly.

“She was so glad she kept rambling about you the whole way home.”

“Oh,” Stiles chokes on the sound and casts his eyes down.

Dad laughs heartily then, still looking tired and too old from that deep burn on his left cheek. “Yes, she liked you an awful lot. I hope Derek spoke to her and explained everything before inviting you over. Right, son?”

Derek gives him an apologetic half-ass smile, “We need to get back to cooking, Dad. Sorry.”

Which, of course, leads to Derek and Stiles getting pushed into the girls’ room and ordered not to come out until their trio has buried the hatchet. Laura comes along for the ride because seriously, it beats going to the movies.

“Before you start throwing things at me,” Stiles warns with his index finger up, approaching the bed where Cora is camped out with her laptop in front of her like a shield, “can I just say that I honestly didn’t know Derek was your brother? You don’t even look alike, for one.”

Cora shoots him a leer, “As in, Derek is smoking hot and drives a cool car and is getting a cool major while I am that clumsy little girl with braces who used to follow you around? Then you’re right, we are nothing alike.”

“That’s not what I meant!” he cringes. “Why do you have to be so snappy? Don’t you think I feel bad? Because I do, and everything is really awkward with you and your parents, and it’s my first time someone introduces me to their family and so far it has been spiraling further down to the unimaginable depths of hell, and I so can’t handle the drama in my life! I suck, all right? I suck and I’m sorry for that. I should just go.”

He turns to storm out, but Dad’s ominous voice from the other side of the door commands, “Don’t even think about it, boy.”

“You can’t leave,” Uncle Peter joins in with a tint of malicious joy, “you’re too good for sanitation in this home. Stay here forever.”

Stiles makes a _What the fuck_? gesture towards the door but follows the order and remains where he is, Derek stepping closer and pressing a reassuring hand on the back of his neck. They both look a bit deflated at this point, and it’s not clear whether their grim faces do the trick or is it simply due to Cora’s infrequent sparks of adult thinking, but she actually puts her laptop away and stands up with a heavy sigh.

“You don’t suck, Stiles,” she starts, her tone almost nice and almost pleasant.

“Well, technically-” Stacy pipes up behind her back, but Laura shushes her.

“And I don’t hate you,” Cora continues. “Honestly. It’s just reflex.”

“What reflex?” he squints, perplexed.

She makes a pained face and looks at Laura for encouragement, and Laura urges her on with a firm nod.

“Whenever I saw you at school after I got over that stupid crush, I saw me, the old version of me that I hated. I was so uncool back then, with the awkwardness and the insecure behavior and those braces I hated so damn much.”

“You forgot the ugly skirts,” Stacy helps out from her swivel chair, amused beyond imaginable.

“Yes,” Cora hisses, defeated and for the first time failing to snap at her cousin, “the skirts, how could I forget? Then, come to think of it, you never let me forget. You were always there, lingering somewhere in the background, and so long as I found you near me, I knew that old me was lagging not far behind.”

“Uh. . .” Stiles clears his throat and shifts nervously on his feet. “That must have been tough.”

“Yeah,” the corners of her lips twitch. “So. No hard feelings?”

Stiles beams at her, still a little bummed out but at least not so beaten-up. “None. We can be bros, right?”

“If you enjoy pestering Derek as much as we all do,” she cracks a genuine smile now and pushes him mildly on the shoulder. It is still awkward, especially after she adds, “Plus I definitely deserve jus primae noctis with him, Der, I saw him first.”

“Too late for that, bro,” Stiles snorts and nudges Derek affectionately, whose face slips into a constipated deadpan.

“Cora, you do realize our dad is listening in on this, don’t you? But,” his features soften a bit, “at least you remembered something from History class.”

 “Gross things have always caught my attention,” she gives him a toothy grin. “Now go away and finish that dinner, I can’t stand to look at you just yet. Maybe later, when I’m full and too lazy to be jealous.”

When the two leave the room, grinning stupidly with relief and Laura trailing behind, they see Uncle Peter running his index finger along the surface of the dresser and then examining it with great care. Having found no dust, he concludes, “Definitely good for sanitation. Stiles, I hereby entitle you my honorable resident.”

“Uh, thanks?” Stiles lifts his shoulders in a shrug and stays that way for several seconds, in his head probably rushing frantically through all the weird things the title might mean. That’s right, he has never visited this place before. _He doesn’t know_.

 The dinner goes unexpectedly smoothly: the two little piggies manage to get their food all over themselves and even mash a little into Stiles’ shirt, assuring him it’s a magic potion, one plate gets chipped, wine gets spilled all over the table and Cora and Stacy break the record of inappropriate jokes cracked in one go – the usual stuff, so to speak. And afterwards, Laura figures it’s only fair to huddle up close to the door with Cora and Stacy, who is an ally just for this one operation, and shoot out lewd comments every time the voices in the other room get suspiciously quiet, followed by careful, stifled groans.

The fun won’t last long, of course: any day now the insurance money will come through and they will move to a new house, maybe even a better one; Derek will get his apartment back and thus his freedom from his evil cockblocking sisters, and Peter’s girls might just have to learn how to keep their home clean.

“It is still cool though,” Laura mutters to herself and smiles faintly.

“What?” Cora asks groggily, half-asleep and leaning on the door. Stacy is already catching Zs right behind her, her black t-shirt with some band’s name on the front heaving and falling evenly.

“Nothing, baby sis. Let’s go to bed, we’ll continue the mission first thing tomorrow.”


End file.
